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I think the author is correct that some big tech companies create a culture where going to 11am yoga is more important that crunching out a few more lines of co

I think the author is correct that some big tech companies create a culture where going to 11am yoga is more important that crunching out a few more lines of code. He's correct that if your focus is on building and scaling product, this culture reduces the velocity of change. However, I see a couple of things the author is missing: 1) Work life balance is about employee long term retention and places like Google spend a lot of energy in hiring, so they optimize for keeping the people they hire. 2) Sometimes an 11am yoga class frees your mind enough to foster creativity. Raw working hours may be reduced but novel solutions might increase. 3) Some tech workers have figured out the odds of hitting it big in a startup or having the next billion dollar idea are not that likely. Instead, they've optimized for a far above average salary with work life balance. There is nothing wrong with choosing that path and this is where the author is missing empathy for people who didn't choose his path.

shadowgovt 6y ago
It's the sprint versus marathon mindset. A small startup has a finite amount of time to either become a big company in their own right or do something so noteworthy that a big company sees the need to acquire them. Nothing else matters. There are minimal incentives to invest in the long-term welfare of your employees because in the long term, the company doesn't exist. You can't even guarantee that an acquisition will keep the employees you have invested in. Large corporations like Google are incentivized to give their employees reasons to stick around. They can expect the company will be there in 30 years, and they can expect a good employee to put in a career's worth of work for them (and eventually have peer and mentorship contacts that encourage other good potential employees to join the company). This is painting with a broad brush of how the incentives are structured... Not all big companies see it this way and not all small companies see it this way. But it's the behavior the marketplace appears to reward.
- steveBK123 6y ago
  Re: It's the sprint versus marathon mindset. As someone who did track in high school, the whole agile nomenclature around "sprint" continues to rub me the wrong way. If you aren't a startup facing a launch-or-fail moment, the approach should be much more that of a marathon. I was joking with my wife that "sprint" to me implies that you go all out and then take a long break before you go again. We should be treating the longterm plan like a marathon and the intermediate steps like "splits". If you are working on a product that's been around for years , the idea that you are an all-star for delivering your 5 points the day before your 2 weeks sprint ends and a lazy jerk if you deliver it the day after sprint ends just incentivizes a lot of shorterm-ism and corner cutting. The model of working "all out" and your "break" for planning is a 2 hour meeting in between sprints where you get praised or scorned for a 10% difference in delivery speed is..
  - matwood 6y ago
    Splits works, but I tend to use iteration. There are benefits to breaking work into chunks and checking in how it's going every 2-4 weeks, but there's no reason to be in perpetual crunch time. There should also be free time at the end of every iteration to do some problem/design/idea exploration.
duxup 6y ago
It's such a weird dynamic. I remember visiting the valley for the first time for a big company I worked for at another location. The scale of work life balance was unbalanced so many strange ways... The tech support team I worked with was in 'building 3'. Nobody ever left that building through out the day. I went to the big cafeteria and the options were amazing. I managed to get some of my peers to go with me, several of my peers from building 3 were equally amazed as ... they never went there, they just worked all day, ate something at their desk, and kept working... Meanwhile I'd go to the cafeteria each day and sit outside and watch as some folks would play basketball for an hour, then a while later show up and chat it up with coworkers (not talking about work) over lunch for what seemed like forever... The game room was always full of the same guys, the other amenities, yoga, etc, and it often included people who I simply never could get a hold of. HR couldn't be bothered to get security to take my photo for my badge for weeks ... because the gym schedule changed. It was a weird, unbalanced, yin and yang.
- Aromasin 6y ago
  I noticed this when I worked at my first "employee satisfaction" focused company. Half the employees took every perk they could get, seemingly doing as little work as they could under the mantra of "work-life balance". The other half never left their desks. It created a strange dynamic of resentment between the two parties, where one thought the other stupid, and the other thought them lazy. It was hard to know where to stand.
  - fileyfood500 6y ago
    I agree, I think this situation fits in nicely with the discussion of how stock compensation doesn’t directly result from the results of your work. Employees who aren’t passionate about or motivated by their jobs seek out compensation in return for retention. And even then, they scale their efforts at work based on their interest. I like the independence of Amazon teams, but the independence is limited when the teams don’t control their own finances.
  - duxup 6y ago
    I once worked for a team was historically over worked, that had changed recently for the better, but the team culture was still pretty stressed and nose to the grind stone. We were working to bring that down, but it takes time. The offices were being renovated and our team was moved next to HR. HR formally complained (apparently there was a process... where HR sent some sort of complaint to ... HR) that the team sitting next to them was not very friendly. Before what I can only imagine would have been a horrific joint team meeting / culture clash could occur, someone very smart put the kibosh on the complaint / meeting .... The culture / work experience differences were extreme.
adrianb 6y ago
He's giving a few examples for work-life balance and I have completely different feelings about - from the 11 AM Yoga class (pretty ridiculous IMO) to taking a personal day (reasonable, people need their day off, maybe the personal day is for an urgent medical check-up?) to working during the weekend (unless the entire service is down and I'm the oncall, it can wait).
- bcrosby95 6y ago
  It's almost like different people value different things. I knew a guy that got a massage every day at 2pm but he also was at work until 10pm. This is also why - even with a flexible work schedule - it's useful to have some set of "core hours" everyone should be available.
- UncleMeat 6y ago
  Isn't that an indication that he sees these things as equivalent? 11am yoga is just as ridiculous as refusing to work weekends. This is precisely the sort of toxic attitude that keeps a lot of people away from startups.
- vmception 6y ago
  Why are several people denigrating the 11am mindfulness session? We're not going to talk about people showing up to work on acid to perform but make fun of people out of college taking advantage of the mental health and exercise course offered on site for an hour, and then excuse an entiiiiire personal day just because its ... more familiar? oooookay. just a perspective. this manager didn't know how to schedule his workers, and couldn't calibrate it and chose to go with "entitled young people are the problem" just like people probably said about him and millennials, there's nothing more to read into this article.
- watwut 6y ago
  In a company I work for, some people take time to exercise at lunchtime - 11yoga seem to fit right there. Basically, lunch then takes longer then if you eat during that time, but not by horribly lot. I does not seem to me so horrible honestly, assuming that you then stay longer to make up for time spend by exercising. I dont do that, because I need to take kids out of school basically, but when I had time to exercise a bit in the middle of the day I was more productive.
inglor_cz 6y ago
I am self-employed and 11am (or, in my case, anywhere within the 11am-3pm window) exercise is actually a great refreshment for my mind.
cactus2093 6y ago
Another glaring omission - he’s now sitting on 7 years of savings from his Google manager salary & equity. If you have a few million dollars in the bank it’s much easier to take the pay cut to work at a smaller startup and chase a more high risk/high reward outcome. It’s completely out of touch to judge anyone for wanting a stable and in the scheme of things ridiculously high paying job with good work life balance, like working at Google.
- serverholic 6y ago
  This is also part of the argument for basic income. Having a stable source of income allows people to take risks like starting their own business or joining a small startup.
  - JKCalhoun 6y ago
    Or just a more lax unemployment policy. I worry that if you give everyone $1000/month: 1) you cannot live on $1000/month so it is an empty gesture 2) rent goes up $1000/month nationwide so it is an even emptier gesture
    - jimbokun 6y ago
      > 2) rent goes up $1000/month nationwide so it is an even emptier gesture Do you also expect food, transportation, entertainment, and technology costs to go up $1000/month nationwide? Rent goes up due to a lack of available apartments or houses in the area. If public policy is geared toward allowing development of sufficient housing for the people wanting to live in a place, that will have a far bigger impact on rents than UBI.
      - JKCalhoun 6y ago
        Not an economist. I liken it to the cost of tuition having gone up, perhaps because of the availability of student loans and the willingness (need?) of students to borrow to get a higher education. Rent is the one you are sort of locked into. Food, etc, you have choices ... moving, much harder to shop around.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
The same people that go for an 11 AM yoga class will stay working until 11 PM because they can and are encouraged to. Second, and another commenter points this out, the desirability of anyone that lands a job at a FAANG means they get away with it. They have Made It, they are the 1% in their field, and they can go anywhere else outside of SF (internationally if need be) and instantly be hired as CTO of any company. Generally speaking. And of course switch to the other FAANG, possibly getting even better compensation and perks and a better 11am yoga teacher.
ghaff 6y ago
"When I was growing up in Tech in the ‘90’s - there was no such thing as work life balance." BS. I worked for a large computer systems company throughout the 1990s. I mostly headed home by 5-6 and I would take month long vacations. (Of course, there crunch times as well.) I also found his pissiness at apparently not being able to curse or whatever in presentations sort of offputting. Yes, general standards for language and behavior in the tech industry has shifted over time. This isn't anything specific to Google. And whining about it comes off as being tone deaf.

shadowgovt 6y ago

It's the sprint versus marathon mindset. A small startup has a finite amount of time to either become a big company in their own right or do something so noteworthy that a big company sees the need to acquire them. Nothing else matters. There are minimal incentives to invest in the long-term welfare of your employees because in the long term, the company doesn't exist. You can't even guarantee that an acquisition will keep the employees you have invested in. Large corporations like Google are incentivized to give their employees reasons to stick around. They can expect the company will be there in 30 years, and they can expect a good employee to put in a career's worth of work for them (and eventually have peer and mentorship contacts that encourage other good potential employees to join the company). This is painting with a broad brush of how the incentives are structured... Not all big companies see it this way and not all small companies see it this way. But it's the behavior the marketplace appears to reward.

steveBK123 6y ago
Re: It's the sprint versus marathon mindset. As someone who did track in high school, the whole agile nomenclature around "sprint" continues to rub me the wrong way. If you aren't a startup facing a launch-or-fail moment, the approach should be much more that of a marathon. I was joking with my wife that "sprint" to me implies that you go all out and then take a long break before you go again. We should be treating the longterm plan like a marathon and the intermediate steps like "splits". If you are working on a product that's been around for years , the idea that you are an all-star for delivering your 5 points the day before your 2 weeks sprint ends and a lazy jerk if you deliver it the day after sprint ends just incentivizes a lot of shorterm-ism and corner cutting. The model of working "all out" and your "break" for planning is a 2 hour meeting in between sprints where you get praised or scorned for a 10% difference in delivery speed is..
- matwood 6y ago
  Splits works, but I tend to use iteration. There are benefits to breaking work into chunks and checking in how it's going every 2-4 weeks, but there's no reason to be in perpetual crunch time. There should also be free time at the end of every iteration to do some problem/design/idea exploration.

duxup 6y ago

It's such a weird dynamic. I remember visiting the valley for the first time for a big company I worked for at another location. The scale of work life balance was unbalanced so many strange ways... The tech support team I worked with was in 'building 3'. Nobody ever left that building through out the day. I went to the big cafeteria and the options were amazing. I managed to get some of my peers to go with me, several of my peers from building 3 were equally amazed as ... they never went there, they just worked all day, ate something at their desk, and kept working... Meanwhile I'd go to the cafeteria each day and sit outside and watch as some folks would play basketball for an hour, then a while later show up and chat it up with coworkers (not talking about work) over lunch for what seemed like forever... The game room was always full of the same guys, the other amenities, yoga, etc, and it often included people who I simply never could get a hold of. HR couldn't be bothered to get security to take my photo for my badge for weeks ... because the gym schedule changed. It was a weird, unbalanced, yin and yang.

Aromasin 6y ago
I noticed this when I worked at my first "employee satisfaction" focused company. Half the employees took every perk they could get, seemingly doing as little work as they could under the mantra of "work-life balance". The other half never left their desks. It created a strange dynamic of resentment between the two parties, where one thought the other stupid, and the other thought them lazy. It was hard to know where to stand.
- fileyfood500 6y ago
  I agree, I think this situation fits in nicely with the discussion of how stock compensation doesn’t directly result from the results of your work. Employees who aren’t passionate about or motivated by their jobs seek out compensation in return for retention. And even then, they scale their efforts at work based on their interest. I like the independence of Amazon teams, but the independence is limited when the teams don’t control their own finances.
- duxup 6y ago
  I once worked for a team was historically over worked, that had changed recently for the better, but the team culture was still pretty stressed and nose to the grind stone. We were working to bring that down, but it takes time. The offices were being renovated and our team was moved next to HR. HR formally complained (apparently there was a process... where HR sent some sort of complaint to ... HR) that the team sitting next to them was not very friendly. Before what I can only imagine would have been a horrific joint team meeting / culture clash could occur, someone very smart put the kibosh on the complaint / meeting .... The culture / work experience differences were extreme.

adrianb 6y ago

He's giving a few examples for work-life balance and I have completely different feelings about - from the 11 AM Yoga class (pretty ridiculous IMO) to taking a personal day (reasonable, people need their day off, maybe the personal day is for an urgent medical check-up?) to working during the weekend (unless the entire service is down and I'm the oncall, it can wait).

bcrosby95 6y ago
It's almost like different people value different things. I knew a guy that got a massage every day at 2pm but he also was at work until 10pm. This is also why - even with a flexible work schedule - it's useful to have some set of "core hours" everyone should be available.
UncleMeat 6y ago
Isn't that an indication that he sees these things as equivalent? 11am yoga is just as ridiculous as refusing to work weekends. This is precisely the sort of toxic attitude that keeps a lot of people away from startups.
vmception 6y ago
Why are several people denigrating the 11am mindfulness session? We're not going to talk about people showing up to work on acid to perform but make fun of people out of college taking advantage of the mental health and exercise course offered on site for an hour, and then excuse an entiiiiire personal day just because its ... more familiar? oooookay. just a perspective. this manager didn't know how to schedule his workers, and couldn't calibrate it and chose to go with "entitled young people are the problem" just like people probably said about him and millennials, there's nothing more to read into this article.
watwut 6y ago
In a company I work for, some people take time to exercise at lunchtime - 11yoga seem to fit right there. Basically, lunch then takes longer then if you eat during that time, but not by horribly lot. I does not seem to me so horrible honestly, assuming that you then stay longer to make up for time spend by exercising. I dont do that, because I need to take kids out of school basically, but when I had time to exercise a bit in the middle of the day I was more productive.

inglor_cz 6y ago

I am self-employed and 11am (or, in my case, anywhere within the 11am-3pm window) exercise is actually a great refreshment for my mind.

cactus2093 6y ago

Another glaring omission - he’s now sitting on 7 years of savings from his Google manager salary & equity. If you have a few million dollars in the bank it’s much easier to take the pay cut to work at a smaller startup and chase a more high risk/high reward outcome. It’s completely out of touch to judge anyone for wanting a stable and in the scheme of things ridiculously high paying job with good work life balance, like working at Google.

serverholic 6y ago
This is also part of the argument for basic income. Having a stable source of income allows people to take risks like starting their own business or joining a small startup.
- JKCalhoun 6y ago
  Or just a more lax unemployment policy. I worry that if you give everyone $1000/month: 1) you cannot live on $1000/month so it is an empty gesture 2) rent goes up $1000/month nationwide so it is an even emptier gesture
  - jimbokun 6y ago
    > 2) rent goes up $1000/month nationwide so it is an even emptier gesture Do you also expect food, transportation, entertainment, and technology costs to go up $1000/month nationwide? Rent goes up due to a lack of available apartments or houses in the area. If public policy is geared toward allowing development of sufficient housing for the people wanting to live in a place, that will have a far bigger impact on rents than UBI.
    - JKCalhoun 6y ago
      Not an economist. I liken it to the cost of tuition having gone up, perhaps because of the availability of student loans and the willingness (need?) of students to borrow to get a higher education. Rent is the one you are sort of locked into. Food, etc, you have choices ... moving, much harder to shop around.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

The same people that go for an 11 AM yoga class will stay working until 11 PM because they can and are encouraged to. Second, and another commenter points this out, the desirability of anyone that lands a job at a FAANG means they get away with it. They have Made It, they are the 1% in their field, and they can go anywhere else outside of SF (internationally if need be) and instantly be hired as CTO of any company. Generally speaking. And of course switch to the other FAANG, possibly getting even better compensation and perks and a better 11am yoga teacher.

ghaff 6y ago

"When I was growing up in Tech in the ‘90’s - there was no such thing as work life balance." BS. I worked for a large computer systems company throughout the 1990s. I mostly headed home by 5-6 and I would take month long vacations. (Of course, there crunch times as well.) I also found his pissiness at apparently not being able to curse or whatever in presentations sort of offputting. Yes, general standards for language and behavior in the tech industry has shifted over time. This isn't anything specific to Google. And whining about it comes off as being tone deaf.